A blog for Literature and Culture of the Middles Ages (ENGL:3226:0001)

Monday, October 27, 2014

The Persistence of Miscegenation Anxiety in Neo-Medieval Fantasy

Whether in their depictions of Jews or
Saracens, giants or monsters, the storytellers of medieval Christian
Europe showed great anxiety over the threat of miscegenation.
Neo-medieval fantasy, for all its modernity and other signs of social
progress, has not succeeded in dispelling this anxiety.

Take for instance roleplaying games.
Racial categories are an important mechanic in these games, as a
player's chosen race will invest her character with specific benefits
and drawbacks. Although it can be said that D&D's racial system
has made substantial improvements since its earliest incarnations
(when “Elf,” “Dwarf,” and “Goblin” were classified as
character classes), the games still have improvements to make. In
both Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, character races are
traditionally limited to pure-bred versions of the fantasy classics
(human, elf, dwarf, goblin, etc) or to “half” versions of these
species. Never mind the fact that this makes creating characters of
more complicated racial background discouragingly difficult, but even
the half species present a host of problems.

Let's look at Pathfinder's half-orc and
half-elf races. Like the half species in D&D (which include half-troll,
half-dwarf, and half-drow, among others), all of Pathfinder's
sentient beings of mixed race are given names which isolate them from
their human lineage. There are no “half-humans” in most RPGs,
placing humans in a position of racial prestige that subjects
half-human children to a kind of “one-drop” rule of racial
belonging. The scenarios of racial mixing in these games are equally
problematic, as these unions are implied to be culturally
unacceptable, produce children who go on to be outsiders, and are
often enacted by force (typically by an “inferior” racial Other).
Although game masters and players may always modify the rules of
these games, developers have some responsibility to avoid
perpetuating medieval social attitudes. Considering the relative ease
with which this element could be removed from the game, there is
little excuse for its persistence other than gaming tradition.

Not all forms of neo-medieval fantasy
have such opportunities to exorcise miscegenation anxiety. Video
games (even more so than tabletop RPGs) are locked into a system of
rooted racial classes mostly as a result of technological limitation.
As a fan of The Elder Scrolls series, I turn to these games in
an investigation of racial mixing in fantasy video games.

The series contains ten playable races,
and these races in turn are slotted into the categories of “human,”
“mer” (or “elf”), and “beast.” To TES's credit,
the ten races of Tamriel are depicted as able to breed with one
another regardless of category, producing fully functional children
who engage actively in society.

However, not once in the series will
the player meet a half-Bosmer, half-Redguard character. Nor will she
meet any other character who appears to be the product of racial
miscegenation. In the TES universe, children born of
interracial unions take on the mother's race exclusively. This
reproductive science resembles that in “The Man of Law's Tale”
and “The King of Tars,” where white Christian women give birth to
white Christian children despite their unions with non-white and/or
non-Christian men. In TES as well as in medieval literature,
mixed race beings are regarded as genetically impossible. In the case
of a video game, this decision likely represents an unwillingness to
spend the additional time and money it would take to design infinite
unique racial combinations. Yet this explanation is not without its
anxieties, as it refuses to acknowledge the multiplicity of
backgrounds and experiences made possible and even encouraged by a
fantasy setting.

The fantasy world created in George R.
R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice is not so racially
constrained as either roleplaying games or video games. This is due
in part to the fact that the author custom-builds his characters, so
to speak, and a mixed race character is no more difficult to write
than any other character. The characters in Martin's books are also
(almost exclusively) human and may thus seem more capable of mixing.

Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo as depicted in HBO's Game of Thrones. Images courtesy Game of Thrones Wiki

Yet there are uneasy moments in
Martin's books, and not all of them are moments of graphic violence.
The moment that stands out is the stillborn child born to the white,
Aryan-styled Daenerys Targaryen and her dark-skinned,
pseudo-Mongolian husband Khal Drogo. In bidding for her husband's
life, Daenerys unwittingly sacrifices the life of her son, and the
creature she births is both monstrous and dead. This child calls to
mind the horrors of miscegenation as depicted in “The King of
Tars,” when the white Christian princess—having become pregnant
by her black Saracen husband—gives birth to a tumorous lump instead
of a baby. Though blood magic is implied to have played a role in the
deformation of Daenerys' child, the reader cannot know for sure who
is to blame, and a kind of disturbing uncertainty remains to fill the
void.

Ultimately, the ghost of miscegenation
anxiety which remains in the neo-medieval fantasy genre does not
linger with intent. However, this does not mean that problematic
moments should be ignored, and ignorance is no excuse for offense.

3 comments:

Good job identifying the problem! Now figure out the math for the algorithm to fix said problem, so that gamers can have a 1/16 elf, 2/3 troll, 1/32 human and 3/64 undead (great great grandma was a necro) character, and then the gaming world will pay you big bucks for solving it! Remember, there are NO problems....only Opportunities! :)